You Can’t Afford To Wait And See With Emerging Tech

To C-suite execs responsible for driving business innovation, I highly encourage you to read Brian Hopkins‘ latest report, which shows that today’s approach to emerging tech innovation is dead. If you are either investing in single technologies or waiting for emerging technologies to mature along the hype cycle, you are setting yourself up for failure.

Your emerging technology research team is probably tracking dozens of individual emerging technologies but is missing how they all fit together. The better approach, as proven in this report and validated by Google and a leading global logistics firm, is to start with a forthcoming customer experience value and apply a chain of modern and emerging technologies to address this solution. Brian’s suggestion: “Challenge your team and colleagues to identify important chains and match future technology potential with painful business pressure points.”

It’s through the leveraging of existing technologies in combination with emerging ones that you can achieve broader values and accelerate the applicability of emerging technologies. As we’ve seen thus far with technologies such as AI, cloud computing, mobile, and more, emerging technologies rapidly accelerate in both capability and price point (lowering costs and generating higher profits) as they gain implementations. Amazon Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos stated years back that the cost of cloud will be cut in half every three years, and as Google, Microsoft, and others began leveraging the technology, we started to see cost reductions in line with Moore’s law. These days, however, Moore’s decades-old prognosis has been somewhat supplanted by what some call “Bezos’ law“: cloud costs halving every 18 months.

Thus, your innovation strategy should be one that embraces chains of technologies that place your firm in a breakthrough business position — not one that waits for claims of hype-cycle emergence that suddenly catch firms off guard and cause them to suffer from digital disruptions. If you want to lead, you need to leverage new technologies now for tomorrow’s customer experiences.

Want to know how to best approach this innovation chains model? Start by reading this great report, then loop back with us to help you apply this mindset to your innovation efforts. Join us to discuss this in person next month at Forrester’s New Tech & Innovation Forum in Boston, July 18–19.